Dr. Ying (Joy) Zhou, Lafayette College will present “Evolution of Dispersal in Integrodifference Equation Models“ at this week's Mathematical Biology Seminar.
Abstract: Studying the evolution of dispersal is important for understanding how populations are distributed in space and how species adapt to changing environments spatially. In this talk, I will present some integrodifference equation models that help us understand the evolution of dispersal. I will begin with a model where we use pairwise invasion analysis to find the dispersal “strategies” that are evolutionarily stable strategies. We prove that the evolutionarily stable strategies are the ones that can produce an ideal free distribution. We then develop a model where the dispersal of the population evolves over time by incorporating spatial memory and learning. If the environment is temporally static, the model has an equilibrium corresponding to the ideal free distribution, and simulation results indicate various ways of convergence towards this equilibrium. When the environment changes periodically or randomly, we still observe some level of convergence, but the dynamics exhibit more dependence on the learning parameter and the changes in the environment.
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